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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24826678">with every thought and with every breath</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake'>Blake</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abuse, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Femslash, Murder, Post-Coital, and stuff, and tension, but this is just, cuisine, it's hannigram so like, mid/late-season 2, replacing good and evil with behaviorism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:00:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,812</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24826678</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Will does what she’s not punished for.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>with every thought and with every breath</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>At last, I have written femslash Hannigram. This basically happened because I was rewatching season 2 and thinking about how hot it is, but the I was like but what if they were <i>hotter</i>? Thank you to my wife for reading this and helping me with summaries always.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Will is not used to using Hannibal’s knives. It’s a struggle to slice the zucchini as thin as she’d been instructed, instead of just massacring it. Not that she thinks Hannibal would mind a zucchini massacre, if it were the work of Will’s hand. She doesn’t even mind her calling it zucchini.</p><p>“I appreciate your help with the courgettes, Will.” Hannibal’s voice is a flood of warm, simple sincerity from above the shine of her filleting knife and whatever it is she’s filleting on the other side of the kitchen island</p><p>Will lifts her eyes just enough to see her watching. Instead of the scrutiny making her nervous, Will’s hand is steadied by the audience. “It’s been a while since I used a sharp knife on vegetables.” It’s an explanation but not an apology.</p><p>Hannibal smiles, pleased. It’s all in the lines around her eyes and the suck around her sharp cheekbones, and not so much on her thin, bare lips, but Will looks anyway. You’d think a serial killer’s smile wouldn’t reach their eyes. You’d think a serial killer wouldn’t have the happy kind of crow’s feet. You’d think a serial killer wouldn’t be such a good kisser. “A fisherman must always prioritize sharpening the knives she uses to gut fish over those she uses to slice vegetables.” The smile reaches her mouth. “Unless you use the same knife for both, in which case, I hope you will allow me to take you shopping.”</p><p>Another zucchini slice, and another, and not a slice of her own thumb in sight. “You seem to have no such problem prioritizing,” she says, ignoring the second half of Hannibal’s comment. She has to take small, silent victories wherever she can, and ignoring something Hannibal wants to say to her usually feels like a victory.</p><p>Those long brown lashes bow so demurely across that angular face. She’s got the demure thing down to a science—not so humble that it would seem disingenuous in a smart, capable, independent woman, but soft enough to inspire empathy. It makes Will buckle at the knees. “On the contrary, I have never had such a hard time maintaining a true hierarchy of my wants and needs.”</p><p>Their conversation always phase-shifts between topics like footwork, drifts in and out of focus so quickly it leaves Will lightheaded to keep up with, like a teenager attempting a spinning waltz on the high school dance floor. Only her partner probably learned to waltz in Vienna, and would catch her in any dip, if only to deny the floor the honor of bashing her head in.</p><p>Will blows some air up, banishing the perpetual stray curl that refuses to stay in her ponytail. “I didn’t know your practice acknowledged hierarchies of needs.” She narrows her eyes at the zucchini. The curl falls over her right eye again. “It seems to me you skipped straight to <i>esteem</i> and <i>self-actualization</i>, right over <i>love and belonging</i>, do not collect $200.” Will blinks when she realizes she didn’t say that as insult, but as some kind of self-abasement; love can hardly count if it’s shared with someone who’s barely a person, who pets dogs and drinks whisky and breathes and does whatever she’s not punished for.</p><p>Of course, Hannibal can tell. “Has the target of your fishing altered from trout to compliments?” She reaches across the counter to take some of the herbs piled up near the zucchini. Her hand cradles the herbs obscenely, rosemary pooling in the same ragged cup of her palm she had shown Will last night, full of clear fluid extracted with prescriptive patience and precise fingers, demanding Will curl up and watch herself fill Hannibal’s palm until she could see her own reflection in it. “Or do you truly doubt my feelings of love and belonging for you?” </p><p>Will does what she’s not punished for. “Maybe it’s a matter of technique.” She sets her jaw, breathes in, smells spice, salt, Hannibal. It’s smeared all across her face, has been since last night. It coats her nostrils, permeates the pores of her cheeks. She takes inhales the same way some people smoke cigarettes and others pray the rosary, grounding, invigorating, submitting to some higher power. “You should show me how to slice zucchini.”</p><p>There’s a fishing line that hooks in her sternum and drags it into her throat when Hannibal moves around her, liquid, carnal elegance like a cat circling its prey or protecting its cub. Will makes her next zucchini round three times too thick. She’s pretty sure it’s deliberate: calculated flirtation instead of flustered agitation.</p><p>Not that there’s any difference to Hannibal, who can see deep enough into Will to know that calculated flirtation never arose except as a symptom to flustered agitation, the dead canary to Will’s invariably toxic pursuit of emotional intimacy. </p><p>Will stiffens, then melts—it’s gotten so easy to force herself to melt—when Hannibal comes up behind her, pelvis just a beckoning hint of a touch at the base of Will’s spine, the rest of her just waiting for Will to collapse into. Their height difference is negligible on most days, unpolluted by any preference for heels between them. Instead of leaning back, Will tilts her head forward, toward the zucchini, toward Hannibal’s hands wrapping around hers and the knife, toward the two pairs of loafers on the shining floor. Out of nowhere comes the thought that Hannibal probably murders in the same sensible shoes she cooks in, and Will chokes back a laugh.</p><p>Hannibal’s hand guides hers around the handle of the knife. The other curls Will’s hand around the too-wide zucchini round that needs further slicing, reminding her of the time in the third grade she convinced her dad to pay for piano lessons and the teacher’s clammy hands had shaped her fingers over the scales she had abused out of ignorance of what the purpose of the scales actually was.</p><p>By the time they slice two paper-thin rounds with the knife, Will’s perpetually tight upper back is sighing gratefully into the pillow of Hannibal’s breasts. Hannibal’s chin rests on her shoulder so she can see for them both. Will closes her eyes. They inhale in unison.</p><p>Will tastes the scent of Hannibal on her face and licks the inside of her mouth, perpetually grounded in hunger. Hannibal simply goes still. There’s a flicker of eyelash at Will’s cheek. “That is not your usual perfume.”</p><p>Something under Will’s sternum curls up and dies like a wadded ball of paper singeing at the edges, a sacrifice to set a log aflame in a real, sustainable fire. A smoky laugh coughs out of her. “Isn’t it?” she asks, trying to remember a time when she didn’t feel <i>covered</i> in Hannibal.</p><p>Another inhale, sharper this time, more focused. “You went about your day, visiting crime scenes, interviewing suspects, meeting with colleagues, all while my scent was smeared across your face, so easy for anyone to smell?”</p><p>The funny thing about Will’s position is there is no wrong answer. She can skip showering and track mud into Hannibal’s entry way or she can clean up nice, shave her legs, and compliment the cabernet. She can slobber all over Hannibal’s graying pubic hair and rest her face there, lapping deep until she’s buried and choking or she can lock her legs and let Hannibal whisper them open. No matter what Will does, whether contrarian rudeness or mimicked politeness, Hannibal believes it’s done because of her influence.</p><p>Hannibal believes things so strongly it’s hard to remember other truths exist.</p><p>“I didn’t interview any suspects,” Will corrects noncommittally, since it doesn’t matter whether she sought to repulse Hannibal, embarrass her, impress her, or whether the whole thing was just for Will’s own comfort. Hannibal’s breath gusts across her face, dragging her own scent across it like the smell of dried grass on the wind. Will bites the inside of her cheek, twitching and pulsing against the bisecting seam of the nice trousers she pulled out of storage a while back. She pushes her stomach against the hard edge of the counter, and together, they slice another zucchini round.</p><p>The only warning, aside from Will’s general understanding of how their interactions always go, is Hannibal’s thumb straying across Will’s hand to circle the bone of her wrist. Will’s stomach plummets, heat grinding against the countertop, and then Hannibal drops. Two hands on her hips, sliding forward, and the graze of teeth just above the leather of her belt. “What we eat has a tremendous influence on the way we taste,” Hannibal says coolly as her hands unfasten Will’s belt and zipper. “I wonder what you taste like today, Will?”</p><p>Will sets down the knife and lets herself be turned over like a slab of meat unfurling from its butcher paper. Hannibal shucks her pants and underwear down just low enough to fit her thumbs in the creases of Will’s thighs and push her open to accommodate a tongue. Will clutches the countertop behind her, horribly turned on by the fact that Hannibal could just as easily have gotten a taste with her fingers and a lot less fanfare, but it’s not about the efficiency, it’s about the power. Hannibal looks up at her without flirtation. It’s the look of a woman who likens her cruelty to God’s getting on her knees for the one she allows to see her like this. It’s the first time Will has seen all of her since letting herself in through the front door, Italian leather shoes caught in the same sheen as the product in her sharp, symmetrical haircut. There are shadows of fatigue under her eyes. She looks almost human. It’s a stirring tableau.</p><p>Hannibal’s tongue moves slicker than Will realized it would, uncovering wetness gathered and tucked close to her body like a prize. It’s a struggle not to shudder. The more she demands, the less she’ll get; she shouldn’t be demanding anything more than she is fated to.</p><p>“How’s the seasoning?” Will asks, forcing her breaths to come as even as the breaths falling onto her exposed, throbbing clit from Hannibal’s smug, open smile.</p><p>Hannibal rises in one fluid motion, wiping her thumb across the gleam of her lip and then licking it. Will finds herself anticipating a kiss before realizing it would be stupid to expect such a gesture after the stunt she pulled. She wonders if Hannibal will make her wash her face before dinner, or if she’ll lick her cheeks clean after dessert.</p><p>“Getting there.” There’s a smile in Hannibal’s voice. She reaches behind Will, not bothering to pull her pants up for her. Will’s own hands still clutch at the countertop and don’t relax until Hannibal presses a grape against the grimace of Will’s clenched teeth.</p><p>Will takes it in. She chews with her mouth closed. She swallows. Hannibal smiles.</p>
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